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Outrage: It’s All in the Labeling
This photo has been making the rounds on Facebook. I had 17 years of formal education and never once had a class in “white history.” I did, however, have classes in the history of the United States, which included people of all colors. If white people often appear in that history, it may have something to do with the fact that the United States sprang from British colonies founded largely by British settlers.
People of other races did figure heavily in the history I was taught, though, and perhaps in the history that you received as well. For example, I learned that settlers moving west displaced the Native Americans who lived there. I learned that slavery was a terrible part of our history, and that hundreds of thousands of lives were lost in the civil war that ended it. I was also taught that Chinese laborers built big chunks of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad and that Japanese Americans were interned during WWII. Perhaps you also learned some of these same things in school as well.
I assume that the gentleman showing the slide is American. If so, then the history of the United States is as much “his” history as it is “mine.” Admittedly, labeling it “our” history doesn’t pack the same emotional punch. The “white privilege” indictment presents American history in a tendentious manner designed to elicit anger and guilt. But why should anyone feel either outrage or guilt if people are taught their country’s history and that of the people who founded it?
I suspect that students in Japan are taught more Japanese history than that of other countries and I would not be at all enraged were I to learn that Japanese history is largely dominated by Japanese people. Nor would I be angry to learn that Nigerian students are taught the history of Nigeria and that that history focuses on the people who make up most of its population.
Published in General
Repeat after me:
“White Privilege” is hate speech that creates an actionable hostile work environment as defined by every single equal opportunity law in america.
How much of the core curriculum of history focuses on the pioneers who settled in the Mountain West or the history of Appalachia to list just a couple of examples? Many (white) people and (white) regions are often neglected or are a side bar in historical curriculum. Just sayin…
It’s very revealing, and I suspect unintentionally so. I wish I could think of any purpose served by contesting it, but I can’t. That’s the problem.
In this time of praise for “Hidden Figures”, there is an attempt to make up for the neglect of some POC by exaggerating the importance of others. Take for example:
https://www.blackenterprise.com/little-known-black-history-facts-87-year-old-black-woman-helped-develop-gps-technology/
I’m sure that Ms. West is a fine person, but to say that she played a pivotal role in developing GPS is false. And doggonite, GPS is an abbreviation for Global Positioning System.
I keep hearing about this “white privilege,” but have yet to experience or benefit from any.
For decades, the general non-elective history (US or world) taught in schools has substantially over-represented the contributions of other than white males (probably now abled white hetero cis-males).
The great American inventors I learned about in elementary and middle school 40 years ago were George Washington Carver, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison. Although Bell and Edison are over-rated, Carver shouldn’t make a top 1000 list. Newton, Einstein, and Marie Curie were the scientists we learned about in history class.
I shudder to think what is taught now. Just google “greatest american inventors” to see what our betters want us to believe.
“History” is not just “stuff that happened.” History is stuff that happened and had lasting consequences.
Sure you have. Only a white guy could get the full benefit of “cool” from those shades.
A comment on Dr Bastiat’s latest post:
Addiction Is A Choice
The great Bill Whittle (who is white) defines “White Privilege” as “The privilege of not having anyone to blame for my failures.”
True. Ray-Bans attract the ladies. 😎
To leave such claims uncontested is to concede their truth. But those who profit from tensions between races cannot – will not – be appeased by any such concessions. As Thomas Sowell wrote in Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study :
Intersectionality overrides white privilege just as transism(?) overrides feminism.
I remember in a college course a student commenting about how she was never taught in school about some darker aspect of American history (I’m pretty sure it was either slavery or treatment of Native Americans), and I was confused, as those topics were DEFINITELY covered during my public school education, as they were for you and I assume the majority of our fellow citizens.
There’s Americans who are very bitter and resentful against their country who act and speak as though the typical American classroom presents the U.S. as flawless and never touches on these topics in history. I wonder if their K-12 education was really as one-dimensional jingoistic as these newly “woke” people portray it, or if they were just slackers in earlier years and not paying attention in class.
I think the idea of white privilege is toxic and that it could devastate the lives of both white and black children. White children may come to believe that they are bad simply because their skin is white, and that their every thought, word, and action further victimizes innocent, oppressed people. Black children may come to believe that bias is so pervasive and built so deeply into the foundations of society that they have no hope of improving their lives through their own actions.
So that’s why I failed so often!
People claim that the point of things like the “white privilege” slide is to foster open and honest discussion about the issue of race. But they serve only to shut discussion down. Any argument a white person (or worse, a white man) makes is easily dismissed with, “check your privilege,” or “you’re just defending your privilege.”
Logically, these claims beg the question; that is, they assume that that which is being debated has already been proven to be true – that white privilege is all pervasive, enjoyed by all white people, and controls their thoughts and actions. The claims also relieve supporters of the white privilege meme of the need to consider any viewpoints other than their own and of providing thoughtful and logical responses.
The “white privilege” meme is based on a truth – that there are benefits to being in the majority. This truth applies not only to people but to most other biological organisms as well. The meme, however, racializes this truth and makes it toxic by implying that majoritarian benefits accrue not just from greater numbers but from malign intent.
Focusing on this truth blocks out other truths. There is, for example, the truth that the black poverty rate in the United States fell to 47% in 1960 from 87% in 1940. This before the Civil Rights Act, before Affirmative Action, and during a time when anti-black discrimination was the law in much of the South. Blacks pulled themselves out of poverty at an astonishing rate in a time of naked white hostility and aggression.
This truth, which should be celebrated as a triumph of the human spirit, has been buried under a great lie – that blacks can only advance with the help of white people. That if some white people discriminate against them, they are helpless. Black people have agency – they can and do improve their lives and those of their families by their own actions. Black agency should not be placed in the hands of white people.
Frederick Douglass spoke to this over a century and a half ago when he said:
Yes, what is remarkable is the insistent by progressives that this aspects of American history are not being taught. My children certainly learned about them going to school in the 90s. I think what progressives mean when they say this is that it is unconscionable that every American still does not believe that our history consists solely of horrible actions by white people.
I am the descendant of Jewish immigrants from what is now Belarus, and who came here in the late 19th and early 20th century – my paternal grandfather deserted the Russian army and joined the US Army a few weeks after his arrival.
I was raised to believe that American history is my history, even though my ancestors weren’t here for the first portion of it. George Washington is part of my history. So is Frederick Douglass. So, for that matter are Millard Fillmore and Jimmy Carter. So is the Transcontinental Railroad, World War Two, the Declaration of Independence, the Trail of Tears, and slavery and its legacy.
If we are to keep 300+ million Americans together we better have a common history of which we are all a part. We need to resist the progressive impulse to recreate the United States as a modern version of Yugoslavia, seething with ethnic and religious tensions and hatred.
Prelude: I’ve got a great track record when it comes to publicly punting morons who approach group teaching/learning/development without humility or introspection. I’ve gotten more’n a couple standing o’s, of which I’m quite proud.
Mongo’s Unprovable Assertion: Bet you if I stood up in that crowd, with that slide up and that fat sac of self-impressed racialism at the podium, and I said:
The lecturer wouldn’t have an answer.
In South Africa those enemies will be deal with. Soon.
I wonder if it will stop there, or whether the properties and businesses owned by urbanized Afrikaners and the white British Africans will be next on the redistribution list.
The fact that you’re unaware of how you’ve benefited from white privilege is, itself, white privilege. So I am told.
It seems to me that those who berate history the most are simultaneously the most ignorant of it. In general they use the perjoritive charge that history as it is taught in this country ignores minorities as an excuse for not reading it, or only taking the watered down nonsense taught in primary and secondary schools as sufficient information upon which to base their opinions. My experience in the middle schools was that few teachers were more than a few chapters ahead of their students in terms of their knowledge base. The few years I taught at the high school level didn’t convince me that the majority of high school history teachers were particularly knowledgeable.
When I started teaching in the 1960s many of my colleagues were well educated to begin with, and furthered their educations through continually reading more and more materials in their subject area. They saw it as their job to enrich the curriculum by expanding the depth and breadth of discussion well beyond the limitations of the textbooks they were using for their course work. The more recent crop of teachers lack intellectual curiosity, derive the majority of their knowledge from school of education, not departments whose focus in the particular area of study, like history or sciences. They are spoon-fed political ideology and encouraged to avoid more “controversial” interpretations of history (that is, ones that do not support the party line.)
I remember in the 60s and 70s having wonderful discussions with colleagues of mine who had served in Korea, and a smaller number who had fought in WW2. They were men who had experienced real life before becoming teachers. They had real life lessons that they could teach in the classroom. That is very unlike the Pajama boys and girls who go from being in school to being teachers without ever experiencing what it is to survive in the real world. The people who taught them simply went from undergraduate school to graduate school to being college teachers, again no life experience, no reality checks. They have nothing to use against the ridiculous claims made by the left, so they just pass it along unedited creating “facts” simply through repetition.
I have never read much of Thomas Sowell but the words in this above quote ring true.
It should be noted that Affirmative Action was in one sense an effort to provide reparations for wrongs done. But as a society, we are now long past the point when anyone who was a slave, or the child or even grandchild of a slave could benefit from AA.
Instead in an effort to worship at the altar of Diversity, we have turned things upside down to the extent that this past summer, Tucker Carlson was forced to spend much of his nightly broadcasts attempting to get the Federal Aviation Agency to reconsider its newest directives aimed at hiring a broader swath of humanity.
When a governmental agency hires people who have less education, less scientific background and less fluency in English to work as air traffic controllers, we are all in danger. Luckily for us, the agency heads did reconsider what they were doing and supposedly now will proceed on a better path to hiring capable people. But the notion that Diversity above All Else is a good idea has proven to be a dangerous one.
OMG! White ppl have the Force!
The best conspiracy theories are the ones where you find out you were secretly a co-conspirator all along.
Nonsense. And to prove you wrong, here is a kindergarten syllabus from just this past semester:
Week 1 Religious Nutjobs Land at Plymouth Rock
Explain about evolution, patriarchy
Arts & Culture: Color pictures of boats
Nap time
Lunch: hard tack
Show Pocahontas
Free days for remainder of week
Week 2 Settlers Mean to Natives
Describe unspoiled landscape, subsequent spoiling of same
Arts & Culture: Color pictures of Natives while breaking ‘Flesh’ crayons.
Nap time/shame wallow
Lunch: culturally appropriated popcorn
Show Dances With Wolves
Free days for remainder of week
Week 3 Southerners Mean to Black People
A discussion of slavery from its inception in 1776 to Civil Rights Era
Arts & Culture: Fashion black construction paper manacles
Nap time/weep in the bowels of an imaginary boat
Show Roots
Lunch: anything but fried chicken
Show rest of Roots for remainder of week
Week 4 Everybody but Mostly White People Mean to Women
Cleaning, cooking and not being able to vote or wear spaghetti straps
Arts & Culture: Dress boys as girls for empathy purposes, probably
Shame gigglers
Nap time/reflection on fluidity of sexual identity
Lunch: get it yourself, I’m not your servant
Show The Danish Girl
Point out that STEM is for girls for remainder of week
Week 5 Overview of Minor Events
Civil War, 19th Amendment, WWI
Arts & Culture: Free coloring, but watch for gun drawings
Nap time/cease fire
Lunch: Melting Pot Mixed Salad
Show Saving Private Ryan because close enough
Parent/Teacher conferences for rest of week
Week 6 Hoover Mean to Poor People
Depression
Anxiety and Suffering
Arts & Culture: Color pictures of poor people using monochrome crayons
Nap time/depressed fugue
Lunch: starve in solidarity
Show Grapes of Wrath
Paeans to FDR for remainder of week.
Week 7 WWII Undefined Holiday Break
Week 8 The Man Mean to Everyone
Atom Bomb/Pop. Explosion/Global Warming: how could anyone bring a child into this world?
Arts & Culture: condom practice
Nap time/avoidance other student’s eyes
Lunch: sausages
Show tasteful soft-core porn
Lightly-supervised free days for rest of week
Week 9 White People Hate Middle-Easterners
Desert Storm, Desert Shield, Desert Shame
Arts and Culture: sew felt burkhas
Nap time/bomb drill
Lunch: raw crude oil
Show actual footage of war
CAIR materials for rest of week
Yep, that’s pretty much how history is taught from kindergarten through college. Bugger the whole corrupt enterprise that is education and academia.
Easy for you to say – you’ve never known the pain of finding out your child us an unperforming grievancer. Three years behind his peers in resentment studies and he couldn’t even identify whose fault it was!
A high school swim team mate of mine told me about an uncle of his. This man was a soon to retire high school teacher. He had seen heavy combat in several island campaigns as a Marine in the Pacific in WWII. He finished college got his credential, and his first job was at a very, very tough NYC high school.
The way I heard the story, the uncle didn’t ask the class to settle down on his first day. He took off his suit jacket, hung it on a chair, rolled up his sleeves and turned to the blackboard, where he wrote his combat record.
The then rolled his sleeves back down, put on his jacket again, turned to the class, said “I’m Mr. Smith. Any questions?”
Things went pretty well after that.